Amanda Demme, in a private suite next to the pool and bar at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, August 12, 2005. In one photo, she is photographed conducting business on her cell phone in preparation for a party at the hotel that evening. photo: Mark Savage
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2005-09-11 04:00:00 PDT Los Angeles -- With one eye on her BlackBerry, which seems to vibrate about 20 times an hour, Amanda Scheer Demme takes a meeting in a large suite that serves as her inner sanctum and explains how she has made herself and the 3-month-old Tropicana Bar that she presides over the talk of the town.

"You want a beautiful, eclectic crowd," she says. Some nights she wants the number at 650, some nights 50. "If I'm feeling we're becoming shlocked out, I pull back the reservations."

Things are changing at the once-forlorn Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, which hosted the first Academy Awards in 1929 and hasn't seen action in decades. The hotel is staging a comeback with a multimillion dollar makeover, trendy restaurateurs (Tim and Liza Goodell of L.A.'s Meson G) and the general upswing of the Hollywood area itself, which is rejuvenating with new restaurants and clubs as well as the Hollywood & Highland Center and Kodak Theatre (new home of the Academy Awards) right across the street.

Demme and ICM agent Michael Gruber, who calls himself the "quiet" partner, have the management contract at all four bars at the hotel, including the Lobby and Library bars and Teddy's, which opens this month and is what Demme calls a "lounge-slash-club" that will be smaller and even more exclusive than the Tropicana. Demme says it will be her "private, private, private place." Gruber likens the arrangement to when boutique hotel magnate Ian Schrager offered Rande Gerber the Skybar at the Mondrian on Sunset Strip, making it an important part of the '90s scene. Of course, in club years, that's another era; and Gerber has long since moved on to the W Hotel in Westwood, where he operates the Whiskey Blue bar.

Many of the antics that go on here are a Google click away. These are the confirmed ones: Someone in Lindsay Lohan's party did jump from her second-floor room into the pool, paramedics did rush Courtney Love to the hospital, and someone was beat up after leaving producer Michael De Luca's party, but there's no consensus as to how far he was outside the hotel property.

The Los Angeles Times reported that Demme and a party manager were arrested on noise violations and that Hollywood's honorary mayor, Johnny Grant, who lives in the hotel tower, said that when she was arrested, "there was a lot of applauding when they hauled her off." Demme says she's ironed out the speaker problems. More important, Demme says her job isn't just to heat up the Tropicana but also to help brand and market the Roosevelt, change the clientele and put people in rooms. Something's working. Occupancy has increased to more than 90 percent.

The rub is that the Tropicana's door policy restricts entrance to people on Demme's guest list, posses not included, and only to those hotel guests occupying the 60 "bungalows," which are rooms in a two-story motel-like '50s addition. "She's making enemies all across town," says one prominent restaurant insider, and she has been the recipient of the inevitable snarky comments on Web sites like Defamer.com. "I want people to feel welcome, but my job is not to make this feel like the Skybar and become a free-for-all and Fort Lauderdale," Demme says defiantly. "My job is to make sure it does not become spring break out there. I can let you in, but I can't let your other five friends in. It's not based on age or looks. There's an amazing group of people from all forms of business, whether it's entertainment or music or great photographers, great art directors, great publishers, amazing businessmen and women, and it's a great mix in age. You want to maintain that glamour and classiness. It's an overall blend."

Occupants of the 240-room tower are categorically not considered part of the blend. Demme says she and the hotel management are trying to figure out a way to make them happy, without allowing them access to the inner sanctum of the Tropicana. Tower guests can go to the Lobby and Library bars, where there is no door policy.

"People get pissed off when you get successful," says Gruber. "I was with someone last night who opened a hotel in Las Vegas, and he gets 100 complaints a day."

But others in the hotel business aren't so sure. "They could be creating a mystique about the place sort of like the old Studio 54, or people could be thinking, 'We're never going to get in, so let's go somewhere a little friendlier,' " says Mitch Mehr, vice president of restaurant operations at the Kor Hotel Group, which operates several boutique hotels in the area, including the Viceroy in Santa Monica and Avalon and Maison 140 in Beverly Hills. "We're in the hospitality industry. I don't think you're being hospitable when you limit yourself and potentially turn people off."

"What Amanda does, she's a genius at. She's the best at what she does. She calls celebrities and gets them to come," says Jeff Klein, owner of the Argyle Hotel, another historic property on the Sunset Strip, where Demme briefly promoted a Mondays-only club last summer. "Unfortunately, it's hard for a hotel to coexist with that. It creates a terrible guest relationship with the hotel and a phony, exclusive environment." By contrast, he points out, the Tower Bar at the Argyle is packed nightly, without a rope, security guards or door policy, with A-listers such as Tom Ford, Marc Jacobs, Anjelica Huston, George Lucas, Bill Murray and anyone else who cares to walk in.

Demme's days start early, at 7 a.m. to be with her two children, 3 1/2-year-old son Dexter and 8-year-old daughter Jaxson, and end late, at 2 a.m. closing time. She grew up in Potomac, Md., surrounded by two brothers and a couple of dozen first cousins. She describes her family as so close they're "like glue." She went to Boston University to study hotel and food administration. "It's weird. I wanted to own hotels and bars, but I hated the cooking process," she says. "You had so many hours of cooking." In college, she discovered the club world of Boston, working as a club promoter "basically hustling college kids. I got the bug."

In New York, she worked as a club "door girl" and started discovering bands. She opened her own hip-hop club and went on to work as a music producer, started her own record label and music management company, opened an event production company and worked as a nightlife promoter and a movie music supervisor, counting 30 movie soundtracks to her credit, plus the television series "Felicity."

She met movie director Ted Demme ("Blow," "Beautiful Girls") back when he was the creator of MTV's influential hip-hop show "Yo! MTV Raps." He interviewed some artists she was managing. He was late. She was angry, but, as she tells it, "He gets out of his car and it was love at first sight for both of us. I couldn't talk. He was totally my type. I'm a chubby chaser. He was sexy and chunky and rugged looking. It was immediate and fantastic." They were engaged six months later. "We had the greatest love affair of all time."

As his film career developed, Amanda music-supervised his films. "We worked together in developing him as a great filmmaker. My background was developing artists. I could see what their strengths and weaknesses were and how to market them, and Teddy, in a very odd way, was my greatest accomplishment." He died of cardiac arrest at age 38, when their son was 6 weeks old, after playing a celebrity basketball game in Santa Monica. Coroner's officials said there was a "small amount" of cocaine in his system.

At 37, Demme is performing what a friend calls "the ultimate juggling act": being a mom, entrepreneur and single parent. Her daily uniform is tough -- heavy silver, shredded tank top, size 27 Mogg jeans and "pimped-out shoes," well, Manolo Blahnik -- and she talks tough, too. "We must have had two dozen meetings about waiter and waitress uniforms," says Jason Pomeranc, whose family company manages the hotel. "She'd say, 'I like it higher.' 'I like it lower.' There could be screaming matches. When it was done (white ruffled tennis skirts and shirts for women, white polo shirts and slacks for men), she said, 'I hate it.' "

What does she want?

"I honestly don't know. We're supposed to have another meeting. But from that back and forth comes the best result," Pomeranc adds.

Demme also has a soft side, volunteering at daughter Jaxson's school, helping a friend plan her daughter's bat mitzvah so that it has just the right amount of cool. And despite her profession, she's a teetotaler. She also has other business endeavors brewing: a TV series she's pitching, a radio show she might host and "there's very, very likely other hotel endeavors around the corner," she says.

For now the question is how long can a hot place stay hot?

Demme has no illusions. "You're always going to get cold. It's like life. You have to be able to deal with the idea that you can't always be on top. You can't. We're on fire now. But in my heart I know there's going to be a moment -- it's like putting out a record. When you first put out a record, it's incredible. Then it has its life, and we have to go back and make a new record to have another life."

It's the same for movies, she says, and bars. "It's all the same. It doesn't matter what genre you're in, it's all in the same game. The Roosevelt is hot and the Tropicana is incredible now, but winter is going to come, and it should have moments of shutdown so people miss it. We'll move inside the Lobby bar and Teddy's, where we're looking at 250 people maximum compared to 600 here. I may be open only at Teddy's four nights.

"But this room will be open," she says of her private suite. "So who's to say I'll make this my own spot of 30 people? What's exciting to me is challenging myself on how to maintain its integrity and keep the longevity. Tonight we're going with a very chill night."

Her necklace is inscribed "Jax" and "Dex."

"They're my life. I do this for them," she says of her children.

"I want them to have what they need. I'll tell you this," Demme adds, "I don't want to grow old in L.A. I'll make movies and do clubs somewhere else. It's a city of youth. And dreams. I'm very East Coast. I want to experience the world and L.A. is not the world. And I want to be around my family. L.A.'s a great place to do what you gotta do. When my kids are in high school, I bet you New York will be so much better."